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Justices Limit Suits Filed Over Family Leave Act Violations

WASHINGTON — By a 5-to-4 vote that split along ideological lines, the Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that state workers may not sue their employers for money for violating a part of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act.

The decision prompted the term’s first dissent read from the bench, by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said the justices in the majority had made it harder for women “to live balanced lives, at home and in gainful employment.”

In a 2003 decision, the court allowed suits against state employers under a part of the law that concerned leaves taken to care for family members. The case decided Tuesday concerned a part of the law that entitled eligible employees to take leaves to tend to their own serious medical conditions.

Like other parts of the law, what the court called the “self-care provision” was drafted in gender-neutral terms. The question that divided the justices was whether the law nonetheless meant to address sex discrimination.

Maryland argued that the federal law did not apply to it because states, as sovereigns, are generally immune from lawsuits for money. In the 2003 decision, Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, the Supreme Court rejected a similar objection from Nevada to a suit under a family leave provision.

Writing for the majority in Hibbs, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said Congress had been entitled to authorize such lawsuits to “protect the right to be free from gender-based discrimination in the workplace” by removing “the pervasive sex-role stereotype that caring for family members is women’s work.”

Under the court’s precedents, Congress does not have authority to do away with the states’ immunity from lawsuits under its power to regulate interstate commerce. Instead, Congress must rely on its power under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment to “enforce, by appropriate legislation,” that amendment’s guarantees of equal protection and due process.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for four of the justices in the majority in Tuesday’s decision, Coleman v. Court of Appeals of Maryland, No. 10-1016, said the case differed from Hibbs because Congress had not assembled an adequate record to show that, in the legal jargon, the self-care provision was a “congruent and proportional” response to documented sex discrimination.

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“Without widespread evidence of sex discrimination or sex stereotyping in the administration of sick leave,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “it is apparent that the Congressional purpose in enacting the self-care provision is unrelated to these supposed wrongs.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined Justice Kennedy’s opinion.

Justice Antonin Scalia voted with the majority but parted ways on the rationale. “The ‘congruence and proportionality’ test makes no sense,” he wrote, adding, “Grading of Congress’s homework is a task we are ill suited to perform and ill advised to undertake.”

Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said the entire Family and Medical Leave Act, or F.M.L.A. “is directed at sex discrimination.”

“Indeed,” she wrote, “the F.M.L.A. was originally envisioned as a way to guarantee — without singling out women or pregnancy — that pregnant women would not lose their jobs when they gave birth. The self-care provision achieves that aim.”

The whole law, she said, was “an appropriate response to pervasive discriminatory treatment of pregnant women.” It avoided singling out pregnancy leaves, she added, to avoid discouraging employers from hiring women.

“It would make scant sense to provide job-protected leave for a woman to care for a newborn,” Justice Ginsburg added, “but not for her recovery from delivery, a miscarriage, or the birth of a stillborn baby.”

Justice Ginsburg wrote that Tuesday’s decision was narrow or, as she put it from the bench, “at least the damage is contained.” Suits for money under the self-care provision are still allowed against private employers, she wrote, and other kinds of actions remain available against state employers.

A version of this article appears in print on March 21, 2012, on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Justices Limit Suits Filed In Violations Of Leave Act. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe